138 ANNUAL REPORT 2014 between the Legal Adviser to the Danish Government, the Central Tax and Customs Administration (SKAT) and the Ministry of Taxation concerning a legal opinion which the Ministry had asked the Legal Adviser to prepare. The Legal Adviser’s investigation was implemented on the basis of the criticism by the National Auditor and the Public Accounts Committee regarding the real property tax assessment. The investigation was intended to uncover whether the practice of the Central Tax and Customs Administration had been within the framework of the law. It appeared that the legal opinion itself and a list of those documents which the authorities had made available to the Legal Adviser had already been made public on the Ministry’s website. The Ombudsman agreed with the Ministry of Taxation that the correspondence with the Legal Adviser took place in a context which implied that a court case was a likely possibility and that section 27(iv) of the Access to Public Administration Files Act ‒ on correspondence with experts for use in court cases or when considering if legal proceeding should be filed ‒ therefore as a general rule should be applied to the exempted documents. However, it was the Ombudsman’s opinion that the Ministry of Taxation should have considered that the legal opinion itself and the list of associated documents had been made public on the Ministry’s website whereby the confidentiality consideration ‒ at least with regard to these documents ‒ had to be seen as having been abandoned. He therefore recommended that the Ministry reopen the case and go through the exempted documents with a view to considering anew whether they could be exempt from access. On the other hand, the Ombudsman could not criticise that the Ministry of Taxation had exempted a few details from access regarding the resumption of specific real property tax assessment cases in some reports from the Ministry’s Internal Auditing with reference to the specific confidentiality provision in Section 17(1) of the Tax Administration Act.